The source-effort coverage of an exponential informetric process

•This article highlights the connexion between the amount of effort (as understood by Shannon) and informetric distribution.•Throughout this paper we will be using the mathematical adjustment concept, which has already been introduced to the field of informetric.•We choose to focus on the Lotkaian and exponential cases.

Lotkaian informetrics is the framework most often used to study statistical distributions in the production and usage of information. Although Lotkaian distributions are traditionally used to characterize the Information Production Process (IPP), we have shown in a previous article that the IPP can successfully be studied using the effort function – the latter having been initially introduced to define the Exponential Informetric Process (EIP). These themes continue to be developed in this article, in which we present a necessary and sufficient condition for the existence of the EIP. Our current approach is similar to the one used to study IPPs. Inverse power and exponential distributions serve to illustrate the results obtained in the context of an EIP. Numerical examples are discussed.